The Matisse Puzzle asks: A questionnaire for passionate readers

We've just created this short pseudo-interview, where questions we're addressing are related to reading habits, but also to the general impression people have about the line that divides fact from fiction (if that line were real or relevant). Readers of this blog, you are kindly invited to answer these questions. Our hope is to create a communal 'reaction' or, in other words, to take the pulse of those who think there's more to fiction than fact.



Our intention is to keep this form going for almost a week, but time can be extended indefinitely, depending on the results we see by the end of this following seven days. The first results (if any are collected by then) will be made public on April 6, the day when we are releasing the sample from our novel, The Matisse Puzzle.

The Matisse Puzzle - COUNTDOWN TO SAMPLING: 6 DAYS

Water is essential to the way our narrative goes. It's in the way the parts of the novel are joined together: like waves coming and going. But water is important for other reasons too. Part of the story is set in Nice, a beautiful tourist spot facing the sea. Another part takes place in Tahiti: surrounded by the ocean, facing what Matisse himself painted and what he recreated through sone of his wonderful cutouts.

Important scenes are, therefore, tied closely to water. As in the quote presented here.
And not to forget, we're one day closer to the publishing of our sample (April 6).

The Matisse Puzzle - COUNTDOWN TO SAMPLING: 8 DAYS

We're one day closer to the publishing of the book sample, set for April 6. And right now, we're thinking of the 'Matisse blue.' Of course, ours is nothing like the blue he was capable of. But it's a good support for our quote.

As already mentioned in our previous materials, the plot of The Matisse Puzzle moves easily between locations. The entire adventure, in fact, is centered on this mobility of plot and characters. One of these locations is Tahiti, the place where, like Gauguin before him, Matisse went with high hopes of reaching artistic Nirvana. The blueness of his Polynesia paintings is a testimony to how intense his experience in Tahiti must have been.

In The Matisse Puzzle, characters move from book to the internet and back

Why shouldn't characters live as valid a life as their creators', indeed as real as the way their readers imagine them? What is reality anyway? Can we blur the edges of fact and fiction, of author, character, reader? Can we make life more interesting by pushing beyond the traditional boundaries? If characters step off the page, or jump out of the movie screen, they may very well have a chance to live in the ‘real world,’ rather than the one they have been placed in. What if they want to cry ‘freedom’, and be independent of their creators, and stand on their own feet, inventing their own life, instead of just saying the lines written for them?

Characters popping up in the real world

In Woody Allen’s movie, The Purple Rose of Cairo, the audience in a cinema are watching the characters in a film playing out the plot, the way they are expected to. Suddenly, one of them declares he wants to join the audience and experience real life, and he steps out from the screen and starts talking to a girl he has noticed from his film-set world. 

The film has this strange effect many of Woody Allen's films transmit: the breaking of boundaries between the real and the virtual, between life and fiction. I want to explore this side of the narrative mystery. I think it is likely to fascinate. I think it is likely to make life seem fuller, rounder, better articulated. In The Matisse Puzzle (released in April, this year), we have made an attempt to replicate this strange multidimensional effect.
Another avenue worth exploring is the fact that characters may start in the mind of their author-creator in one way, but every single individual who reads the book has an image and sense of the character which may be different from the one intended.
Is that not a valid definition of existence? Even a character so well known as Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennett, will have a unique identity in the mind and heart of every fan. So in a sense Lizzie lives in different forms in each of those individual readers. So who can say she is not real, when she exists in some dendrite of each of those brains.

The wonders of the internet are great

Recently, the Guardian ran a story about children’s authors being interviewed by their characters played by child fans dressed up in appropriate costume. This was just a basic Q and A session, but it opens a door to deeper possibilities.

These days, crowd-sourcing and fan fiction sites are used to invite fans to create more characters or more plot lines: in fact as many plots as there are people interested.

Isn't that fascinating?, we asked ourselves while we were creating the book we are about to launch. In The Matisse Puzzle, we want to explore some of these intriguing possibilities. In our plot, some of the characters are fictional, some are fictional versions of real people. Some of them live not only through the book's plot, but through their own blogs, through their own avatars, through their own digital ID's, in which the book (the object) turns out to be insufficient to cover their full complexity. Social media take center stage in this novel, which we hope to be as original as the promises we are making here.
So let us know if you'd like to read a novel of this kind, which explores not only story, but also the media capable of carrying the said story along.

The Matisse Puzzle - COUNTDOWN TO SAMPLING: 9 DAYS

The Matisse Puzzle, no mystery now – is the book I have finished not long ago. It will be out on the market in April. I haven’t set the date yet, since more needs to be done in terms of editing, formatting for eBook, and advertising as well. Everything’s good at this stage. The excitement of debut runs high, but that’s normal – I know. I’m treating it with deep breaths and patience.

While waiting for the last loose ends to be tied up, I will organize a sampling session. I have some buddies helping me on this – just like my fictional buddies in the novel. Fiction and fact get mashed up together, which makes life really interesting. The first chapter will be up on this blog on Sunday, April 6. I will be very much interested in receiving feedback, so please come by, read, and leave a comment. I hope you all agree with me on how important it is for a debut novel to be discussed before it grows its proper wings. So please, do leave your comments here as soon as the sample is up. There will be plenty of reminders beforehand, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr, and possibly Goodreads as well.

Here’s the first flyer I’ve created and distributed through social media.

I'm keeping this in my Pinterest board, Thrillers,
where all future flyers will be stored as well,
along with my favourite books and other relevant pins.

I hope the quote will whet your appetite. If it does, I’m happy to give away some copies of my novel, at a date that will have to be established. There will be more of these little snippets to come, as I’m pretty seriously engaged in the process of making myself and my book known to my dear virtual public.

I am also interested in hearing from people who have ideas for original promotion strategies. Until then: good time to all of those who read and happy writing to all of those who write.

Why the Matisse Puzzle?

A couple of years ago I was visiting my son in Valbonne in the South of France. I spent a couple of days in Nice and went to Cimiez - the upmarket suburb where Matisse lived his last years, invented the famous ‘cut outs’, and died in 1954.

Cimiez has a fascinating history with the remains of a Roman ampitheatre and thermae, as well as a17th century Franciscan monastery.

Musée Matisse in Cimiez

The Olive Grove

La Regina

View of Nice

The Matisse Musee is in the Villa des Arenes, a fantastic villa set in an olive grove park which he used to regularly promenade in.  It houses a very particular selection of his works. Opposite it is the cemetery where Matisse is buried. To the left of that is the La Regina palace hotel where Matisse rented an apartment suite with a view over the city. I stood and looked at the same view and sunlight that Matisse lived with. I gazed at the bright terracotta roofs of Nice and the brilliant blue of the Mediterranean.

Out of all the quite different exhibits in the museum I was particularly struck by the extraordinary huge hessian sheets filling two rooms which featured crude cut outs of Polynesian objects from the sea and sky- including jellyfish, seaweeds, fish, seagulls, sharks, and corals.

Tahiti and the cut outs

Matisse spent three months in Tahiti in 1930 in search of fresh inspiration from tropical light and colour, following the path blazed by Gauguin. But there are puzzles. Why was Matisse not inspired to paint a series of Tahitian scenes in oils? Why was he so fascinated by the experience of looking underwater? What was the link between his lagoon snorkeling and his revolutionary cut-outs which date from the 1940’s and are about to enthrall Londoners at the forthcoming Tate Modern Exhibition in London next month?

Matisse wrote in his Tahiti diaries:

“I bathed in the lagoon, I swam around the colours of the corals, set off by the piquant black tones of the holothurians (sea cucumbers).I plunged my head into the transparent water in the absinthe depths of the lagoon, my eyes wide open, and then I jerked my head up out of the water and gazed at the shining totality’

(in André Verdet, Préstiges de Matisse, Paris, Editions Emile Paul 1952)

Henri Matisse, Polynesian Sea

I started chatting to an eccentric in the Museum – a Matisse nut I, would call him. He was dressed in a Matisse-style striped wide lapel suit from the 1940’s, complete with waistcoat. He even had a grey goatee beard. He was obsessed by the Polynesian connection and whispered to me had I heard the rumours of the existence of a secret masterpiece.

Oh darlings, Odalisques

The quiet sexuality of Matisse's Odalisques! The beauty of form, the calmness of flesh, the centrality of woman!

This post was inspired by a little answer I gave on Google+ to somebody talking about the figure of the Odalisque in Matisse's paintings.

But I wanted to add more of my own thoughts, and that little reply did not serve the purpose, since it was a little old. So here I go again, Matisse paintings my guide, as almost always.

Grand Odalisque a la culotte bayarde
via www.natashabarr.com

Odalisque with red culottes
via www.artchive.com

Odalisque
via www.henri-matisse.net

The great thing about these lascivious, inviting creatures is the extent to which they blend with the context. The texture of the painting is so complex, so decorative, the patches of flesh surprise the eye. You rest your eyes on the woman flesh with the pleasure of having found a spot of calmness. A true tribute to woman's body.
Then what's equally fascinating is the realism of almost all Matisse settings and of his forms. He took pains at arranging the subject in a context that was then reproduced in detail. When that was not the case, he placed the bodies in those intriguingly Matisse-esque forms that undulate and flow across the canvas like water.

We have, for this, the testimony of George Brassai's photographs. They captured Matisse painting, drawing, but almost always contemplative at the same time: as if daydreaming.

Brassai captured the attention of both artist and model
via www.modebulb.com

I love this entire series of images focused on Matisse's work on nudes (like the Odalisques, of course). Photographs by George Brassai, Cartier Bresson, and Man Ray, among others. They view the artist in the plenitude of his own statement:

"My models are not some pieces of pottery in a room. They are the main theme of my work. I am entirely dependent on my models."

You could tell it from how they sit, how they capture light, how they encapsulate form. Even an untrained eye can see how these attributes migrate to the Matisse cutouts representing woman forms.

But more about this in a future post.

Matisse, that mystery

I take Matisse to be a mystery. That which exists beyond the hand, beyond the eye, beyond all sensations. I don't want to sound haughty, nor saccharine, nor academically inclined towards loving what everyone else has fallen in love with. But Henri Matisse's paintings, cutouts, drawings, sculptures, form a universe of their own - an ontology where everything spins in one direction, without stirring up the chaos too much but generating an interesting harmony of its own. 

Apollinaire, who professed not to like confusions, prefaced an interview with Matisse by setting the record straight in his usually radical, poetic manner:

There is no connection between painting and literature [...] The aim of Matisse is plastic expression in the same way that lyric expression is the aim of the poet.

No way one could put it in more general terms. But, confusion or no confusion, I'm sure Apollinaire did mean to see the two facing each other. And when poetry and painting stand adjacent there's something that migrates, something that takes flight, something that travels as if by boat, as if by superfast broadband. And that, I believe, is mystery.

Don't ask for definitions! And yet - mystery is what resists any solidity of evidence, any show of hands, any record that brags authenticity. Take this video, for instance.

It's an affidavit. It lets Matisse talk about the aim of his art: not to create beauty, not to let colour on the page, but to change the very quality of paper. Maximum materiality; return to fundamentals. There's so much handling of facts here. The clip is factual as in having-been-there, having-heard-him, having-filmed-that, having-had-Matisse-in-front-of-one's-eyes. But one may wonder: How do we know for sure that paper changes? How much of what Matisse says here is true and what's just made-up stuff, for the interviewer to record?

Matisse speaks. And in speaking he, like any artist, sets up traps with words, with voice. Not with the voice of that Cartesian demon intent of fooling everyone with the view of enjoying the good laugh that will crown the joke, but with the voice of the artist who transforms what he touches. When transformation takes place, the most factual of facts withers like a flower lacking nourishment.
And what do we do then? What?
I have a guess: we contemplate. We look at a Matisse drawing, a painting, a cutout - and we do it in silence. In so much silence, we can hear ants whispering to the stars. Raymond Radiguet, once Matisse's contemporary, hailed that teacher who asked the class to cover their mouths while looking at works of art. She wanted, in her honesty, to teach them how to admire without words.

Bonheur de vivre, The happiness of living well
Source: Ross Skoggard

But this is a blog!

Words will come and go, come and go, come and go, because they travel. Words too are mysteries, aren't they? Otherwise would Apollinaire have placed them face-to-face with painting?
And so, while acknowledging this paradox, we'll speak of our admiration. We'll try to learn to contemplate without words - it's a promise. But when contemplation is finished we'll let words come flushing in, flood-like, to fill the space where Matisse's paintings or Matisse's cutouts have already taken everything over, to the last inch.
Because we might have a few things to say about Matisse, mightn't we?